The Future of Petén

On April 30, the Inter-American Development Bank approved $907,780 in funding for sustainable tourism development in northern Petèn. The Executing Agency is the Fundación Para El Desarrollo de Guatemala, FUNDESA.

It looks like the Guatemalan forest rangers from CONAP, the Council of Protected Areas, think they can make a dent in the eviction of ranchers who have staked illegal claims to the land in the Maya forest — if they get a lot more funding from the federal government.

Claudia Santizo, CONAP’s secretary, said the agency is working to evict eight ranches near the El Mirador archaeological park, home of dozens of semi-excavated Maya archaeological sites.

From what we’ve heard, “Cuatro Balam” is a name with symbolic resonance. Bayron Castellanos, of the NGO Balam (a separate entity from the government plan), tells us it’s not geographic reference but an allusion to Maya cosmology where the four cardinal directions have to be in balance. In other words, what they do in the north of Cuatro Balam has to take into account the south. The four cardinal directions together give rise to the fifth element, life, perhaps meaning biodiversity in this case.

At first I thought Cuatro Balam referred to the four anchor cities of the project (Tikal, El Mirador, Piedras Negras, Uaxactún) listed in a government press release, but I am not sure this is the case.

Also around the time that Cuatro Balam was announced, it was said to cover cover 22,500 square kilometers. The Maya Biosphere Reserve is only 21,602 square km. Will the plan cover the entire reserve and more?

Here are some links to press articles about Cuatro Balam:

http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2008/julio/17/251129.html
http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20080717/pais/61787
http://www.prensalibre.com/pl/2008/mayo/23/238379.html
http://www.globalheritagefund.org/news/ghf_in_the_news/ghf_mirador_in_the_news_may_08.asp

Please take a look at our new Wikipedia entry on “Cuatro Balam” and feel free to edit and add more accurate content. One of the items we’re in discussion about is the origins of Cuatro Balam. Many people we talked with seemed to suggest that Cuatro Balam was not just an initative, but a geographic reference too, i.e., an actual place. This is unclear from the promotional materials from the government, however, and it’s also not clear whether, if it is, it would overlap the Mayan Biosphere Reserve. Do you have an opinion on this?

A Tale of Two Wildernesses

by Michael Stoll

Published in the Earth Island Journal, a publication of the Earth Island Institute
To read the article as it appeared in the magazine, click here.

I knew things were bad when Paulino dipped his empty plastic water bottle into a shallow, muddy swamp puddle. After attempting to sweeten the sludge with a bright orange vitamin C tablet, the middle-aged Guatemalan archaeologist smiled at his Boy Scout ingenuity.

Somewhat calmed by his presence of mind, I was nonetheless scared about the prospect of getting lost in the vast, uncharted, tropical forest, carrying nothing but a few granola bars and an audio recorder. We had started out with 10 other adventurers on a planned 50-mile jungle trek, but had gotten separated during the hike. I asked Paulino if he thought we’d really have to drink his concoction to stay hydrated if we failed to locate our fellow hikers, whom we hadn’t seen for two hours.  “I don’t know how far we are exactly,” he huffed as we slogged through one of a thousand narrow trails through the bog. “But I try to be prepared, you see? That’s all you need.”

My introduction to the Mirador Rio-Azul Park made it vividly clear that in 2008 it was still possible to experience a true, vast, unpeopled wilderness, where tropical bird calls ring out instead of cell phones, and it’s handier to distinguish the ceiba tree from the ramon than it is to tell a Lexus from a Hyundai.

The purpose of my trip to Mirador last summer was to see the Guatemalan tropical forest firsthand, before it possibly suffers the fate of Laguna del Tigre, the neighboring “wilderness” at the other end of the northern state of Petén.

The contrast could not have been any starker. By all accounts Laguna del Tigre Park looked very similar to Mirador until about 15 years ago, when tens of thousands of people started settling along the few roads punched into the territory by oil and logging companies. Then a rapid and chaotic land grab ensued. Whether it was primarily due to wood poachers, or landless peasants looking for new places to plant their corn and beans, or ranchers who followed them to graze beef cattle on the depleted land, the effect was clear. Environmental groups estimate that as much as 70 percent of the 1,300-square-mile park has been burned and converted to agriculture — much of it, according to press reports, with the encouragement of corrupt officials and narcotics traffickers who use land and cattle to launder their drug money.

In Laguna del Tigre, travel could not have been more different from the jungle trek in Mirador. I rode shotgun in a pickup truck with a ranger transporting park police, and we covered about 400 miles in a 14-hour trip. There must have been more cows there than in all of Wisconsin, and the tropical sun was ever-present. The few improbably regal-looking ceiba trees towered over the charred remains poking through the ranchlands. The forest was all but wiped out.

These parks, virtually side by side, are part of what was supposed to be an uninterrupted 8,300-square-mile biosphere reserve protecting a huge swath of land that saw the rise and fall of the ancient Maya civilization. What the different fates of these two protected zones illustrate is that the best-laid plans of environmentalists aren’t enough to save the forest.

In the previous weeks, our team interviewed dozens of experts about where the strategy had failed and who was to blame. Some were lobbying the government for a moratorium on logging. Others wanted to expand community-based “sustainable” logging businesses. Both sides acknowledged, though, that the key to saving the forest probably lay in the knowledge of local people. And yet there was little evidence that politicians were making decisions based on the reality on the ground any more than they ever had. When President Álvaro Colom announced his latest conservation initiative in July, no more than a handful of Petén community leaders were among the 250 guests invited to the presidential palace.

Obviously, Paulino and I made it out of our parched predicament to reach our destination — the mostly buried Maya ruins at Mirador — and then back to civilization. Paulino, who had made the trip three times, said it was local knowledge about proper hydration, forest food, geology, and orienteering that had saved his skin on the walk more than once.

“All these are recommendations of the older people,” he said just before we were rescued by a forest guide. “When I got to Petén I didn’t know much. But having paid attention to these things, it solved many problems. These are the very little things that aren’t said by stupid people, but people who are rooted in this place.”

Michael Stoll is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist who traveled to Guatemala on a 2008 grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. See his work at www.futureofpeten.com.

The road to El Mirador 

By Nadia Sussman for the Mercury News

Buried beneath deep jungle growth in Guatemala’s northern reaches, the ancient Maya metropolis of El Mirador is worth the walking. And walking, and walking some more.

Go now for the rare chance to experience lush tropical forest and have the ancient city — more and more of which is being uncovered by archeologists every year — largely to yourself. Soon, both the wilderness and the solitude may be harder to come by.

On July 16, when Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom presented the Cuatro Balam plan for increased tourism and environmental protection within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, he showed the following video:

The video invokes the wisdom of the ancient Maya, their superior knowledge of the heavens and the natural world. It goes on to paint a picture of the year 2023. The region is protected from invasive farming, drug trafficking and illegal logging. We see toucans and ancient pyramids rising above the jungle canopy. Major archaeological sites such as El Mirador are accessible to tourists by an electric train and 12 million people have visited the area. A new university promotes the study of the region’s flora and fauna by global scholars.

Much stands between this bucolic vision of Petén and present-day realities. Thousands of people live within the Maya Biosphere Reserve, legally and illegally. As of now, the government periodically evicts illegally settled communities in an effort to enforce the reserve’s boundaries. If the Cuatro Balam plan gains momentum and secures funding, evictions may accelerate. Already, CONAP, the government agency for protected areas, is undertaking a “technical integral study” to determine which communities will have to go.
Read more »

Richard Hansen, Director of the Mirador Basin Project and head archaeologist at El Mirador archaeological site was named Environmentalist of the Year by Latin Trade magazine.

Latin Trade today announced the winners of the Latin Trade Bravo Business Awards intended to “honor government and business leaders for their contributions to progress in Latin America.” The award puts Hansen in the company of corporate leaders such as Michael Dell of Dell computers and Craig Herkert of Wal-Mart Americas, as well as major Latin American political figures. The awards ceremony will take place on October 24 in Miami.

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the strangest things about Guatemala is how close it is to the US. And how easy to leave. In our plane, we effortlessly crossed the border where Mexico tries to keep the Guatemalans out, then cleared the wall the US is building to keep the Mexicans out. Just four and a half hours out of Guatemala City’s gleaming new airport we landed in LA.

It is jarring to move so quickly from one environment to the next. And I am reminded that this very act — the ability to move freely — has so much to do with the situation in Petén.

Petén is being shaped by politicians and conservationists who draw borders trying to redefine how people and forest products will move through the region. Petén is being shaped by narco-ranchers, invasive farmers and fire-setters who mow down the forest illegally in swaths and patches. Some are big-time landowners with political connections. Others are campesinos who have edged north one by one, seeking the parcela that they couldn’t find anywhere else. Petén is being shaped, too, by the communities rooted there who have been living off the forest for generations. Very few of the latter people could ever get on a plane and just go. Read more »